The one big mistake people make about Salinger and Catcher in the Rye.

He’s Not Holden!

By Ron Rosenbaum|Posted Thursday, Sept. 12, 2013, Slate

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J.D. Salinger, who is the subject of a new book and film, pictured during the liberation of Paris in 1944.
Photo courtesy Weinstein Company

I didn’t want to write this piece. I’ve got Salinger fatigue, and I bet you do too. But it always happens. Salinger controversies (like Nabokov controversies) keep pullin’ me back in.

Here I thought I’d addressed all the necessary Salinger questions a few months ago when I discovered the newly donated Salinger letters at the Morgan Library and wrote about Salinger’s obsession with Vedantism and the price his fiction paid for his flight into what I called “spiritual self-medication.” I argued that that “spiritual self-medication,” so necessary to save his mind from wartime horrors, stole his soul in a way—or in any case stuffed his later prose with undigested mystical didactism. Certainly the later Glass family stories suffered for centering on the insufferable Seymour, the purported “holy man” and Vedantic sage, with whom I finally was so fed up I called him a “mystical windbag.”

But the new Salinger book and film have pulled me back in, because they both perpetuate a fundamental mistake about The Catcher in the Rye, a mistake worth correcting.
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